For the first time since coming out as a lesbian on Valentine’s Day, Ellen Page opens up about the pain of being in the Hollywood closet.

On the morning of Feb. 15, still dazed and giddy from the events of the night before, EllenPage shuffled through LAX to catch a flight to Montreal, where she was shooting X-Men: Days of Future Past. Had that really just happened? Thousands of congratulatory tweets, still pouring in, confirmed that yes, it had.

Just half a day earlier, the compact movie star (5-foot-1 in sneakers, and she’s usually in them) who broke through playing a punk-rock-loving pregnant teen in 2007’s Juno had stood in front of a crowded Las Vegas ballroom and, in an electrifying declaration of personal identity, come out as a gay woman.

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Like her X-Men character Kitty Pryde, whose powers allow her to pass through solid matter, Page had traversed the proverbial closet door as gracefully as if it never had been there at all.

Now, two months later, the 27-year-old is seated on the terrace at the Chateau Marmont — not far from her new $1.7 million home in the Hollywood Hills — for her first extensive interview since the Valentine’s Day speech heard round the world. She’s outfitted in her preferred uniform of jeans, red flannel shirt and black bomber jacket, a “TOM BOY” trucker hat pulled snugly over her head.

It begins with a handshake and a world-weary smile, and not long after she’s reminiscing about the warm welcome that greeted her on the X-Men set upon her arrival: “I can remember sitting behind monitors with Hugh Jackman, and he was like, ‘You seem so different already!’ And I was like, ‘I feel different already.'”

Over the course of a wide-ranging two-hour conversation, Page gets fired up (about “binary gender systems,” as well as discussion of her producing her first film), starry-eyed (at the thought of one day getting married and raising kids) and flat-out silly (about her addiction to renaming people’s pets on Twitter).

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She also proves disarmingly open about her years-long battle with depression. “I was sad, honestly,” she later admits. “And obviously that’s a very personal thing to say, but I say it to encourage whatever other people are feeling. Very sad, isolated, a lot of anxiety. No more.”

In 2014, as roadblocks to same-sex marriage topple throughout the country and such gay-friendly shows as Glee and Orange Is the New Black proliferate, the prospect of another celebrity coming-out story might not seem all that remarkable.

It has been 17 years, after all, since EllenDeGeneres declared, “Yep, I’m Gay,” on the cover of Time — a landmark moment for gay and lesbian visibility that, America tends to forget, was followed by the cancellation of her ABC sitcom and three years of industry radioactivity.